Okay. So, as I finish updating one of my test boxes to Fedora Core 4 (punters will like to know that it was completely painless on a standard desktop system) and mull whether or not I should take the plunge and replace SuSE on my M100, I'd like to share a couple of personal notes on what it means to be an IP-centric person in a mobile operator:

It is still an uphill battle, not due to any lack of vision or awareness on the organization's part (I am very fortunate in that regard, since my company definitely gets it), but mostly due to the amazingly intricate and interdependent bits that have to be set (or reset) in precisely the right places at precisely the right times to comply with the precisely right regulations for the whole thing to deliver precisely the right service as seamlessly as it does. Not to mention the strategic aspects of most of it, which would just about fit in a two-hundred-strong stack of slideware.

Everyone else who works in the "standard" IP world keeps asking "but isn't it as simple as (insert perfectly ordinary example here)?" and I think back to when I asked precisely the same questions.

In short, it was one of those days when I had to hold in my head two completely contradictory (but utterly sensible) notions of how a service should be delivered and try to get my point across at the same time.

That said, the only relevant bit of Apple news today is that 99.999% of all the videos showing a perfectly standard PC (usually a laptop) booting pirated copies of the Mac OS XIntel edition for developers were classified as hoaxes, and despite the jabbing and taunting I got from most of my PC friends, remain so for the forseeable future, no matter what Dvorak says (there, that's as close as I'll link to him).